


Dogs and Kings

by Senri



Category: Animorphs - Applegate
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2009-12-31
Updated: 2009-12-31
Packaged: 2017-10-05 13:02:21
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 499
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/42011
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Senri/pseuds/Senri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Written for 31_days on livejournal with the prompt "expect to be valued accordingly".  Jake and Rachel and how things turn out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dogs and Kings

i. _I am His Highness' dog at Kew;  
_  
Rachel's been cats and dogs and all kinds of things, including elephants and fleas and giant squids and her daddy's girl and really bugfuck crazy and not all that abnormal, truly, thanks. Some of these changes are so easy to name - her gymnast's body twisting, bulking into a grizzly's frame, or growing wings and taking flight, or withering away to eight legs and a fat round body in the middle and compound eyes.

She can be anything she wants to be, really.

And some of the ways she's changed are so much harder to call as concrete: where the girl ends and the warrior begins, the day where she woke up not her daddy's little girl anymore but the Amazon who'd rip alien warriors apart to protect him, and her mom, and her little sisters too. And Cassie, Jake, Marco, Ax. Tobias. Always Tobias.

The last career day Rachel remembers, she wanted to be a lawyer.

Today? She wants to be useful. Doesn't matter what it takes.

ii. _Pray tell me, sir, whose dog are you?  
_  
"You probably won't come out of this one," Jake says to her. He's being honest with her, and easy on himself; giving her every opportunity to say no. To figure some other way to make things play out, only there isn't any other way, this is it. The big one. Cousin Tom has a bullet with his name on it, and that bullet's name is Rachel.

"Three years, Jake, and you think I'm going to choke right now?" Xena, warrior princess, laughs. She's thinking about Jordan and Sara. They aren't as close anymore, even though she loves them. There was too much she couldn't tell them, for too long, and there's still to much that she can't.

Love has always been a hot and torturous thing in her. Scalding, like swallowing an ingot of hot lead, and almost too heavy to bear.

Rachel's heroism relies too much on her own private madness for her love for anyone to be safe, or sacred. There's a world to be saved, after all. Hurt feelings are secondary.

Jake looks about ready to lie down on the ground and sleep like the dead. Rachel's hair is heavy, unwashed and dirty; she has dirt under her fingernails and if she wasn't morphing and demorphing regularly her toenails would probably be splitting. As it is, they're fine.

Her hair is pulled into a fat braid. It's glossy and full, mostly because it hasn't seen a good shampooing in a long time.

"No," he says. He didn't think she'd choke. He knew she'd take this, own it, go out and die for her country and a lot more besides.

Rachel flips her braid over her shoulder and gives her runway smile. "So I'm your man. Woman. Tell me the plan."

Just point her in the right direction, cousin Jake, prince or king or whatever he is. Point her and let her go.


End file.
